DONATE

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Cold Case Posse on BHO Birth Certificate & Selective Service Card

Sherriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse has ruled the Obama Birth Certificate a forgery which will embolden the Birther Movement to try to gain steam on President Barack Hussein Obama’s Natural Born Citizen (NBC) status which would point to the President to be ineligible for the Office he now holds.

Adding the fuel to the Birther steam is that a surprising amount of Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets covered the News Conference that Sherriff Arpaio called to announce the results of the Cold Case Posse investigation.

Typically the Left is sticking to its support of the President by saying nothing new was released at the News Conference. Leftist supporters demonstrated potential false-positive conclusions by running similar tests on the Birth Certificate resulted in similar results; however I did not notice that they were trying to prove authenticity of Adobe documents. The duplicated tests only demonstrate that Adobe documents in general may produce different layers just as the Cold Case Posse had discovered.

The bulk of the evidence that Arpaio’s investigators presented to the reporters seemed to come from theories that have been thoroughly debunked by other sources, including the conservative National Review Online.

The link in the above quote goes to an April 2011 TPM post explaining what anti-Birthers would call debunking the Layer Theory:

The basis for the forgery claim lay in a basic misunderstanding of how computer image formats work. Nixon observed in his post that the PDF file of Obama’s long form birth certificate could be broken down into “layers,” including a background and separate foreground text. “This in no way proves that anything on it is fake, but only that the document from the WH was composed of multiple elements,” he wrote. “How to interpret it is up to the viewer.”

Of course, viewers who didn’t let President Obama’s short form birth certificate derail their birther fantasies back in 2008 interpreted it exactly as you’d expect, spreading the “layering” claim on sites like conservative messageboard FreeRepublic as proof it was faked.

In fact, the effect was not a sign of foul play at all, but a common attribute of PDF files containing text as an image. On many PDFs, a feature called OCR (optical character recognition) recognizes the letters in the image and separates them into their own layer. This explains why you’re able to highlight and copy raw text from some PDF files even though it’s actually not a word processing document.

The conservative news site National Review Online received so many e-mails from their readers on the “layer” theory that they looked into it and issued their own thorough debunking. To demonstrate that the long form release was nothing unusual, NRO scanned a copy of their own magazine cover into a PDF file, easily recreating the same layer effect in Adobe Illustrator.

Now that I have done my due diligence by sharing the Left’s debunking of the Layer Theory let us proceed to the Cold Case Posse and see if their observations of layers produced by OCR (optical character recognition) technology is the same conclusion as anti-Birthers.

First of all the PDF version of the Cold Case Posse investigation has been posted on Scribd which you can read or download HERE.

To watch the Arpaio/Cold Case Posse news conference in its entirety you can click HERE.

Here is a Rense.com report that neither agrees or disagrees with news conference findings but simply reports what was said.

"President Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery, not a scan of an original 1961 paper document as represented by the White House when the long-form birth certificate was made public," Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said at a press conference today in Phoenix.

This is the major preliminary finding of a six-month ongoing Sheriff's Cold Case Posse law enforcement investigation into the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president.

Having developed probable cause to believe the long-form birth certificate was most likely a computer-generated forgery, investigators began examining other evidence of President Obama's life history.

** President Obama's Selective Service card was most likely a forgery, revealed by an examination of the postal date stamp on the document;

** Records of Immigration and Naturalization Service cards filled out by airplane passengers arriving on international flights originating outside the United States in the month of August 1961, examined at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., are missing records for the week of President Obama's birth, including the dates Aug. 1, 1961 through Aug. 7, 1961.

Beginning in October 2011, the Sheriff's Cold Case Posse, consisting of former law enforcement officers and lawyers with law enforcement experience, examined dozens of witnesses and hundreds of documents, as well as taking numerous sworn statements from witnesses around the world.

In August 2011, 250 members of the Surprise, Arizona, Tea Party, residents of Maricopa County, presented a signed petition asking Sheriff Arpaio to undertake the investigation.

The Tea Party members petitioned under the premise that if a forged birth certificate was utilized to obtain a position for Barack Obama on the 2012 Arizona presidential ballot, their rights as Maricopa County voters could be compromised.

The Cold Case investigators further determined that the Hawaii Department of Health has engaged in what Sheriff's investigators believe is a systematic effort to hide from public inspection whatever original 1961 birth records the Hawaii Department of Health may have in their possession.

"Officers of the Hawaii Department of Health and various elected Hawaiian public officials may have intentionally obscured 1961 birth records and procedures, to avoid having to release to public inspection and to the examination of court-authorized forensic examiners any original Obama 1961 birth records the Hawaii Department of Health may or may not have," said Mike Zullo, the lead investigator in Sheriff Arpaio's Cold Case Posse.

The Cold Case investigators have not yet determined who, when, or precisely how the long-form computer-generated birth certificate released on April 27 may have been forged, but investigators say the evidence contained in the computer-generated PDF file released by the White House as well as important deficiencies in the Hawaii process of certifying the long-form birth certificate establish probable cause that a forgery has been committed.

The Cold Case Posse investigators advised Sheriff Arpaio that the forgers most likely committed two crimes: first, in fraudulently creating a forgery that the White House characterized, knowingly or unknowingly, as an officially produced governmental birth record; and second, in fraudulently presenting to the residents of Maricopa County and to the American public at large a forgery the White House represented as "proof positive" of President Obama's authentic 1961 Hawaii long-form birth certificate.

"A continuing investigation is needed to identify the identity of the person or persons involved in creating the alleged birth certificate forgery, and to determine who, if anyone, in the White House or the state of Hawaii may have authorized the forgery," Arpaio said.

Among the evidence released at the press conference were five videos the Cold Case Posse produced to demonstrate why the Obama long-form birth certificate is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery.

The videos consisted of step-by-step computer demonstrations using a control document.

The videos were designed to display the testing used by the investigators to examine various claims made by supporters of the April 27 document.

The videos illustrate point-by-point the investigators' conclusion that the features and anomalies observed on the Obama long-form birth certificate were inconsistent with features produced when a paper document is scanned, even if the scan of the paper document had been enhanced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and optimized.

Additionally, the videos demonstrated that the Hawaii Department of Health Registrar's name stamp and the Registrar's date stamp were computer-generated images imported into an electronic document, as opposed to actual rubber stamp imprints inked by hand or machine onto a paper document.

"That we were able to cast reasonable suspicions on the authenticity of the Registrar stamps was especially disturbing, since these stamp imprints are designed to provide government authentication to the document itself," Zullo said, stressing that if the Registrar stamps are forgeries, the document itself is likely a forgery.

The investigators also chronicled a series of inconsistent and misleading representations that various Hawaii government officials have made over the past five years regarding what, if any, original birth records are held by the Hawaii Department of Health.

"As I said at the beginning of the investigation," Arpaio said, "the president can put all this to rest quite easily. All he has to do is demand the Hawaii Department of Health release to the American public and to a panel of certified court-authorized forensic examiners all original 1961 paper, microfilm, and computer birth records the Hawaii Department of Health has in its possession."

Arpaio further stressed the Hawaii Department of Health needs to provide, as part of the full disclosure, evidence regarding the chain of custody of all Obama birth records, including paper, microfilm, and electronic records, in order to eliminate the possibility that a forger or forgers may have tampered with the birth records.

Arpaio went on to say the President should also authorize Kapiolani Hospital, the birth hospital listed on the Obama long-form birth certificate, to release any and all hospital patient records for Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, his mother, and for the newly born Barack Obama, in order to provide additional corroboration for the original 1961 birth records held in the Hawaii Department of Health vault.

"Absent the authentic Hawaii Department of Health 1961 birth records for Barack Obama, there is no other credible proof supporting the idea or belief that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, as he and the White House have consistently asserted," Zullo said.

"In fact, absent the authentication of Hawaii Department of Health 1961 birth records for Barack Obama, there is no other proof he was born anywhere within the United States."

Arpaio concluded the press conference by suggesting a congressional investigation might be warranted and asked that any other law enforcement agency with information referencing this investigation be forwarded to his office.

________________________________

SlantRight Editor: Now here is a WND report. WND is decidedly a pro-Birther Internet News Magazine.

Members of the Cold Case Posse in Maricopa County, Ariz., whose report to Sheriff Joe Arpaio yesterday confirmed there is probable cause to believe Barack Obama’s much-ballyhooed birth certificate document is a forgery, have begun briefing members of the county law enforcement team who may be involved in hunting for those responsible.

At a news conference yesterday, Arpaio and the chief investigator for the specially appointed Cold Case Posse, Mike Zullo, confirmed that they had found evidence of forgery in the creation of the birth certificate image and fraud in the presentation of that piece of work as a real government document.

They also said they found Obama’s Selective Service registration likely forged, and they said it appeared as though officials in Hawaii were covering up information about Obama. They also said it was not outside the realm of possibility that Obama might have been born overseas.

All of this relates to the Constitution’s demand that a president be only a “natural born citizen,” which is not defined in the Constitution. But many analysts believe at the time the document was written that would have meant the offspring of two citizens of the country.

Arpaio began the review at the request of hundreds of his constituents. They were concerned a fraudulent document was being used by Obama to be on the 2012 election ballot in Arizona.

Arpaio said at the news conference that the investigation would continue, and he might ask for a congressional investigation to address the issue. He also suggested that other outside agencies may end up participating.

While he said that decision remained in the future, sources told WND today that the Cold Case Posse, a team of volunteers not being paid by taxpayers, were briefing sheriff’s office investigators on the status of evidence, so that they might be able to participate in the future as those responsible for the fraud and forgery uncovered already might be pursued.

Interestingly, the Cold Case Posse report said, “To quell the popular idea that Obama was actually born outside the United States, we examined the records of Immigration and Naturalization Service cards routinely filled out by airplane passengers arriving on international flights that originated outside the United States in the month of August 1961 [Obama's birth month]. Those records are housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, records from the days surrounding Obama’s birth, August 1, 1961 to August 7, 1961 are missing. This is the only week in 1961 were these immigration cards cannot be found.”

The posse said it already has identified at least one person of interest in the alleged forgery.

The Cold Case Posse had advised Arpaio that they believe forgers committed two crimes and sources say they now are sharing that information with Arpaio’s investigative team.

They say it appears the White House fraudulently created a forgery that it characterized as an officially produced governmental birth record. And they said White House fraudulently presented to the residents of Maricopa County and to the American public at large a forgery represented as “proof positive” of President Obama’s authentic 1961 Hawaii long-form birth certificate.

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after spending nearly three decades writing on a wide range of issues for several Upper Midwest newspapers and the Associated Press. Sports, tornadoes, homicidal survivalists, and legislative battles all fell within his bailiwick. His scenic photography has been used commercially, and he sometimes plays in a church worship band.